Anyone can explain the science behind burn in on QD OLED running at 50-100 nits?

Rym · February 22, 2023

I'm very curious and would like to understand why OLED still experiences burn in quickly (1000-5000 hr) on static elements such as game HUDs when it's running at around 50-100-150-200 nits.

Is the brightness really so great that the pixels still wear out this fast?

tikker · February 22, 2023

Because the pixels displaying the static HUD degrade more or differently from the pixels not displaying the static HUD. Higher brightness may lead to faster degradation, but lower brightness is not immune to it and to my knowledge this degradation is simply an inherent characteristic of OLEDs.

Stahlmann · February 23, 2023

OLED displays emit light from an organic compound that wears out over time, just like light bulbs or every other LED wears out and will eventually get dimmer or fail. But a 4K WOLED display has around 33 million LED's. Each pixel has 4 subpixels: Red, green, blue and white. Every single subpixel is a tiny LED.

3.840 x 2.160 x 4 = 33.177.600

Burn-in basically means a specific set of subpixels wears out and cannot show the same brightness as the rest of the screen anymore. So unless you're staring at a uniform color, you might not even notice burn-in once it accumulates enough to be visible. And even then you might only see the burn-in on specific colors. For example if you have a set of blue subpixels that are very worn, you won't see them when these pixels are displaying white.

Pixel shifting will reduce the risk of fine lines like text or many HUD's burning in, as they're not displayed by the same pixels all the time.

Limiting brightness to 100 nits or so will significantly reduce the wear and burn-in won't occur for longer. Lower brightness means less heat, and less heat means less wear on the LED's. Because of that models with a heatsink or newer, more efficient OLED technologies that use less power also become more resistant to burn-in.

But in the end all OLEDs will show burn-in after enough use, just like any LCD monitor's backlight will probably fail some day. But depending on your useage you won't see burn-in before you get a new display or you can have problems within a few months of owning the display. We can set our expectations depending on the use case, but there really is no general rule of how your experience with burn in will be. All we can say is you're either a high-risk user or a low-risk user. In the end if you simply don't want to bother with burn-in you just have to buy an LCD. High-end LCD monitors will still deliver great image quality and pixel response times, but they're just not on the same level as OLED. But LCD's are still not 100% immune to burn in and while they last longer, they also have a finite lifespan.

For example my LG C9 OLED has over 6000 hours of use and still doesn't show any signs of burn-in. Simply because it's mostly used to watch movies and the occasional gaming session, so bascially a low-risk scenario. I'd say in terms of getting an OLED mainly as a TV, burn-in is a fixed problem. The only reason why it's getting more attention atm is because people started to use them as computer monitors more and more over the last 1-2 years.

And unless you play only one game, i'd say video game HUD is mostly not a problem either. Playing 200 hours of the same game will not really cause issues. However, if you're the type of gamer that plays one game for thousands of hours, it might become a problem.

Like in many cases, you have to manage your expectations no matter what you buy. I hope that could clear things up for you.

e22big · February 23, 2023

You have to understand that the LED part in OLED - are just an extremely small, light-emitting-diodes, literally the size of a pixel. Of course, it's going to lose some performances and degrade overtime, just like how transistors which are just as small in CPU or GPU die or degraded overtime (and diodes serve the same function as transistors, a conduit of energy conversion.)

But unlike a processor, you don't just lost just some performances with some degraded silicons, you need every single diode (or at least most of them) to create an image, so if some of them die or degraded, you have burn-in.

Even if you limit your brightness, burn-in is inevitable because the LED is just too fine and too vulnerable. It's like underclock your CPU to half and expect to perform at max performance forever. It's just the matter of when (but it can also be years - possibly a decade, instead of months, if you've tried hard enough)

Doobeedoo · February 23, 2023

It's in the name hence organic part. It just degrades faster and more prone to do so. Even though QD OLED is more resistant it's still OLED in the end. Aside from abusing the panel should be fine mostly, still too early to tell as these are not long on the market.